Twitter Isn’t Sticky Enough

Currently, more than 60 percent of Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent. For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.

In other words, Twitter isn’t sticky enough.

This is a real problem, and while many Twitter lovers might have seen Oprah entering the stage as something of a saviour, I hate to break it to you: She looks bored already. Last tweet was posted on Friday last week. That’s not the way to use Twitter. Still, the Oprah effect has given Twitter a huge boost, so they can certainly afford to attract less than 40% of the newcomers, right? More on Techmeme.

But is that 60% a real number? Does it track all of the twitter users who, during that first month, switch to Tweetdeck or using their iPhone/Blackberry application to update twitter? Did this study (or can anyone) track that info?

I suspect that some of those “don’t come back” people are using other applications to access twitter. Now that’s an important stat to discuss b/c it shows how twitter can just throw up banner ads to make money … but it means the 60% is not a real number.

I just don’t see the fun of Twitter and apparently I’m not alone. With that many people failing to return Twitter must not be all that it was cracked up to be. The company is going to have to work hard to keep bringing in new users if 60% of the old ones never return.